Radio Garden review: Web platfrom and app

 

I enjoy various forms of radio listening: traditional radio for local stations, SDR radio for testing and measuring, kSDR for remote listening to global stations, and Radio Garden, the helpful app/website for streaming stations worldwide.

Today, I will write about my renewed interest in Radio Garden and review the app after downloading it on my smartphone.

I discovered Radio Garden roughly four years ago when it first gained popularity. Let's take a look at their mission statement and values.

The website for this platform is http://radio.garden. Here is the information found under the settings tab:

Radio Garden invites you to tune into thousands of live radio stations across the globe.

By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.

Radio Garden is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our dedicated team is hard at work tending to the garden on a daily basis. Planting seeds for the future and keeping the weeds at bay.

Team

As head gardener of Radio Garden, Jonathan Puckey is involved in design, development and everything in between.

Abdulwadûd Louws takes care of the steady stream of station submissions and makes sure our collection of over forty-thousand live stations is neat and tidy.

Barbara Hennequin works with us as art director, illustrator, product designer and writer.

THE Garden

In 2018 we launched mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms. In 2019 we introduced the ability for our users to search for their favorite stations and places.

In order to better facilitate day to day use, we launched a redesign of Radio Garden in 2020 in collaboration with digital product designer Timo Hofmeijer. Rebuilt from the ground up as a mobile first experience, it laid the groundwork for future developments.

In 2021 we introduced a new section called Browse, a first step to opening up the collection of stations for more curated experiences. One of the first features is curated playlists, where we invite specialists from across the globe to tell stories through selections of stations.

Origins

Radio Garden started out in 2016 as an exhibition project commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in the context of the research project Transnational Radio Encounters. It was created, designed and developed by Studio Puckey & Moniker.

After taking care of the project in the following years, Jonathan Puckey turned Radio Garden into a small independent company in 2019.

Fist lets consider about the application. They offer several premium features such as an equalizer, sleep timer, and ad remover for $3.09 per month or $30.99 annually. Operating in the free mode I had to occasionally close and restart the app to get rid of these very annoying adverts waiting for around 20 seconds.  Sometimes this ad blocks the program without the ability to return back to the program . The new rental system format provides developers with a constant revenue, good for enhancing the program, but for most users, they will revert back to the standard  free version . This blocking is very important to be corrected as soon as possible. Notice that happens in both my Xiaomi models (5 years old 5A and the 12C )

To return to the program operation  on their web page, as far as I recall, Garden used TuneIn or other stream audio aggregators to gather all available stations and visualize them in a semi 3D globe.  . I hope that today's user input has helped inn getting one step out of  aggregators

The interface is simple and concise .  You see a globe with thousands of markers indicating station locations here called as ‘seeds;  . It's good to know that the size of the markers corresponds to the number of stations in a particular place or city.

 

 

Above is a full page screenshot map of the Caribbean displaying the area of radio station coverage inside the circle. You listen to the place in the centre of the circle. Once set, the left tab displays all local stations in the area  plus the nearby places . To secure listening to your desired station, use the lock feature in the right bottom . Otherwise, while browsing the map, the station may change to the next city or seed station.

Worth to notice , there are many station heard with a very bad audio. This is the mistake from the station transmitting with usually low bit rate or poor audio , this is not from the interface!

Zooming can be adjusted either by using the mouse roller or the -+ zoom buttons below the lock.

To save a station, click the small heart in the top-right corner of the player. Additionally, you may share the station or visit their site from the “…” menu. 

 

 

There's an intriguing Browse button that leads you to stations with captivating themes, such as playlists featuring rare music genres from all over the world. Some examples include The Rare Tongues, Time Travels, and Independent Sounds. There are currently eight different playlists available, and hopefully, more to be added later.

By simply using the next or previous button, you can journey to various locations on the planet. For example, one of my playlists jumped from Brazil to Lagos and then to Tanzania. I listened to rather exotic music in my ears, even though I am quite accustomed to listening to these via shortwaves. Right now, I am listening to samba, then changing to some extraordinary tribal sounds from Tanzania. Afterward, I switch to some traditional Greek or Bulgarian music, then later hear some Hindic music from Afghanistan. Finally, I end with gamelan from Indonesia. Interesting music. This is a hypothetical scenario.  All the world's music is now available on your smartphone or desktop! I would appreciate it if more user-made playlists were added to this tab. 

It is worth noting that the application can play music in the background and even when the mobile's screen is turned off. Based on my testing, the playback can last for an extended periods or  bypass the Android system's hibernation.  

This application or web site is currently the quintessential program for listening to music from all over the world. Thousands of options for music, sports, and talk radio are available, reminiscent of the past when shortwave radios were used to tune in to remote stations from all over the planet . It is unclear if there are any competitors, but Radio Garden certainly delivers excellent performance!

I rate it 9/10 - a very good program that could still be improved with new playlists or even those granted by the users. I would appreciate the addition of an "undo" option to allow for returning to the previous station or even a few stations back. And finally correct the bug with the  adverts blocking the application!